1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to an information system, and more particularly to an electronic business information system and a method thereof for searching business information, wherein the search result is generated from uniformly designed template structures and in a predetermined interface language so as to optimize a search application of a particular user.
2. Description of Related Arts
With the advance of information technology, searching information through Internet has become part of their daily life for many people. A typical search process usually involves the submission of a search request to a search server which is linked to a particular search database, a matching of the search request with the relevant information in that search database, and production of a search result by the search server, wherein the search result is transmitted from the search server to the user's terminal and displayed by a displaying device, such as a monitor.
For search engines such as “YAHOO” or “GOOGLE”, when one conducts a search for a subject by keyword(s), a great list of websites that contain such keyword(s) will be sited and listed for logging in. However, in business purposes, the searchers generally just need to search for kinds of product or companies which provide the required services or products. These common search engines fail to provide such immediately results to the searchers all over the world. In other words, for conventional search engines, when one is trying to search a particular item, the search results may be totally out of context because the conventional search engines will search for the particular item wherever that particular item appears in the web or in the relevant yellow pages. For example, when the user is searching “bicycle” with the aim of comparing prices and sales locations, the search results may consist of a technical website describing the working principles of bicycles. This kind of search results will be of little use by the user.
Electronic yellow pages search engines such as “YELLOWPAGES.COM” or “YELLOW.COM” provide domestic search for entities within a district or a country. However, due to the convenience of worldwide transportation and the World Wide Web, there is no more domestic business and, in fact, most of the product or service providers are international entities who are capable to sell products or provide services to anyone all the world or even have national branch companies or offices in different countries. For example, the “WALMART” has thousands of stores all over different states of the United States and different cities of different countries. It may provide different products and stocks in different stores. Similarly, a consumer or buyer of a product or a service that meets his or her requirement would not mind where this product or service comes from whatever country or district.
With its unprecedented growth over the few ten years, the internet has finally made us a real global village but language remains an important issue. Language barriers prevent people from understanding all of the online information they seek. There is no real international search engine or web site that can provide information of searching product or service providers in different countries with different languages support for different searchers of different countries. For example, an American searcher may merely find product or service providers listed in English language and located in the United States. If the searcher wants to search for product or service providers in other countries or in other languages, he or she must log out the original web site and then log in another web site with the same search engine or using another search engine to do so. In other words, the searcher cannot compare searched information of the products, services, and/or the product or service providers with that of the other countries in different languages.
In addition, the search engines will generally confine the scope of a particular search to a particular locality and the search results thereby produced are the consequences of largely truncated search processes. For example, when one is searching a book entitled “Harry Potter” using an American based search engine, the search result may consist of a plurality of Americans bookstores which sell that particular book. However, when the user is comparing the price of that book at various different bookstores (which may not necessarily be in America), he may not be able to get a comprehensive search results. An obvious example is that if there is a United Kingdom online bookstore which sells “Harry Potter” at a discounted price, the user will not get this piece of information because the search process may be truncated to discard United Kingdom's bookstores.
Moreover, as a matter of fact, the majority of websites posted on Internet are written in English. This is partly because English, being a recognized international language, is widely accepted all over the world. Conventional search engines, such as “YAHOO” and “GOOGLE”, are usually user-friendly and interactive so that they present little problems for daily applications.
Difficult problems arise however, when one is trying to search a local website using an English-based search engine, or indeed search engines in any other language different that of the local website. For example, using an English version yahoo to search for a Chinese or a French local website (which do not written in English) is very inconvenient. In order to resolve such difficulty, some search engines incorporates translation function whereby websites in a particular local language is translated by a predetermined dictionary so that the local websites (after translation) are matched and sorted alongside with the language of the search request so as to broaden the scope of the corresponding search result.
An associated difficulty in this area is that no one can guarantee the quality of the translation so that the search result may turn out to contain a vast number of unrelated websites. The situation will be even worse when the search request is inaccurately translated. At the end of the day, it may be that the search result contains web data which is completely irrelevant.